A Miscarriage of Justice: Women's Reproductive Lives and the Law in Early Twentieth-Century Brazil

Abstract

A Miscarriage of Justice is a fascinating study of the ways in which laws, institutions, medical professionals, and other public figures imprinted norms of gender, race, and class on women in manners that limited their effective citizenship and their well-being. The book innovates in how it maps complexities and nuances in the relationships between poor women, health workers, police, and laws.Focused on Brazil's federal capital of Rio de Janeiro, the study is situated in a society that was institutionally regulated by the 1890 penal code, which “increased women's criminal responsibility for the crimes of abortion and infanticide and criminalized the illegal practice of medicine” (p. 4). Roth explores how the policing of abortion and of infant death extended to include efforts to regulate pregnancy, maternity, and infancy.The first chapters of the book examine the history of subjectivities that were brought to laws and to institutional practices. At the center of these subjectivities were judgments about women in situations of poverty. Such judgments were fed by legacies of the slave regime, by eugenic thought and its projections in emerging practices of criminology, and by patriarchal projections about honor and gender roles. Roth explains that “the end of slavery and the rise of republicanism forced all women's reproductive lives—but particularly those of poor women—into regimes of institutional regulation” (p. 5). Why? Because in the thinking of a set of actors including physicians, criminologists, and others involved in crafting laws and policies, “women reproduced the country that elites were intent on shaping” (p. 5).Roth considers how the beliefs and practices crafted into public policy by these actors intersected in disparate treatment of pregnancy and childbirth. Such policies and practices sometimes resulted in police investigation and in criminal charges, the records of which serve as the major source base for the study. The very rich array of cases makes possible a close reading of individual people's experiences and perspectives, as well as an analysis of the ways in which institutions and authorities acted on those people.The latter chapters, through a rich reading of a range of criminal cases and police investigations, provide a careful and complex reconstruction of women and communities contending with the often perilous intersections between infant death and the law. Roth produces an insightful and instructive interpretation of policing as something less homogeneous and encompassing than it often can seem. Roth states that within public institutions and law enforcement, “structural inconsistencies shaped individual ones” (p. 159). Roth points to the high rates of turnover, from the chief of police to the ranks of civil police, that resulted in inconsistent policing practices.This lack of institutional cohesion and consistency gave individual police officers wider latitude to interpret incidents that could be charged as abortion or infanticide. In turn the lack of cohesion and consistency also made police into arbiters of the situations of social class, race, marriage status, and other characteristics, which they employed to determine whether an infant death was a crime. Roth also considers the “stigmas of dishonor” that were produced by police investigations and the fear that this imposed on people and communities. A Miscarriage of Justice also stands out for carefully reading how the cases were shaped by race, class, and judgments about them.The book includes a detailed afternote on sources that will serve as a practical guide for scholars interested in these histories and that, together with the careful and clear discussions of approaches and methods throughout the book, makes A Miscarriage of Justice a significant contribution to the history of gender, race, class, public institutions, and reproductive life.